PrisMe: a Tangible User Interface for Group Work Regulation A Preliminary User Experience Study Alexis Olry de Rancourta, Julien Veytizoub, David Bertolob, Robin Viviana, J. M. Christian Bastiena, Stéphanie Flecka a Université de Lorraine, PErSEUs, UR 7312, Metz, F-57045, France b Université de Lorraine, LCOMS, UR 7306, Metz, F-57006, France Figure 1. PrisMe being used by a group of pupils during a test session in real school conditions. Abstract The aim of this experiment was to evaluate a tangible environment called PrisMe (Collective attention led by a Mediated environment) developed during the e-TAC project. The methodology for creating this environment was based on an end-user-centered approach. Its role is to support collective work and foster collaborative learning in an educational context (i.e., primary and secondary school). More specifically, this set of artifacts must promote noise regulation during group activities, facilitate pupils’ time management and support classroom management for teachers. The evaluation of PrisMe took place with pupils aged 9 to 10 in a real school context. Pupils worked in groups of 4 and completed mathematics problem-solving activities lasting approximately 20 minutes. At the end of these activities, they were given two user experience questionnaires, the AttrakDiff and the meCUE. The user feedback allowed us to validate a significant number of interactions and brought out points of vigilance for the final development phase. The results of the questionnaires are encouraging and seem to indicate that PrisMe provides a satisfactory user experience to pupils. Keywords 1 Smart classrooms; Tangible supported collaborative learning; Technology enhanced learning environments. Proccedings of ETIS 2020, November 16-20, 2020, Siena, Italy EMAIL: [email protected] (A. 1); [email protected] (A. 2); [email protected] (A 3), [email protected] (A. 4); [email protected] (A.5); [email protected] (A. 6) ORCID: 0000-0003-0723-1680 (A. 1); 0000-0002-5564-1310 (A. 3); 0000-0002-5564-1310 (A. 4); 0000-0002-8875-0388 (A. 5); 0000- 00002-5345-3084 (A. 6) © 2020 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). CEUR http://ceur-ws.org Workshop IS S N 1 6 1 3 -0 0 7 3 CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org) Proceedings 1. Introduction In line with UNESCO or OECD recommendations, K-16 educational programs stress worldwide the need to build the 21st century cross-disciplinary competencies needed by all for personal fulfillment and development, social inclusion, and active citizenship [7, 8, 10, 22]. The ambition is to enable children and teenagers to learn how to know, do, be, and live together [26]. This objective, announced by Europe as a priority for the 2020s, cannot be achieved without increasing the part taken by the digital in the educational system [6]. In this context, the education system has begun a transformation towards collaborative work, autonomy, and critical thinking. Nevertheless, in order to achieve these objectives, the students must be able to regulate themselves during the collective work. Studies showing the importance of self-regulation in educational success are numerous [4, 5, 19, 21]. Supporting the implementation of reflexive and responsible positioning helps to regulate the activity. Wagener [29], for example, highlights the need for students to develop self-regulatory skills, including thinking for themselves, setting goals to expect, and monitoring and evaluating the progress of their work against these same goals. However, our observations and the feedback from the teachers we interviewed showed that collective work generates counter-normative and harmful behaviors in the work environment. This situation leads to difficulties for teachers in classroom management. Nault and Fijalkow [20] describes classroom management as “the way in which interactions between a teacher and students in the classroom are regularized in a formal or informal way, even when they are unexpected situations or reactions.” This definition, which is broader than just disciplinary phenomena, encompasses what Nault and Fijalkow [20] have identified as the building blocks of classroom management. The e-TAC project aims to develop technologies that respond to real needs identified by teachers and learners, the end users. By developing technologies that offer a positive user experience, we aim to facilitate their implementation and adoption. By evaluating our technical solutions at an early stage of design, we want to validate the interactions we will develop in the next iterative loops. To support classroom management during group activities, we propose PrisMe, a set of tangible artifacts designed to encourage the regulation and autonomy of students working together. 2. Tangible User Interfaces and Group Work Regulation We aim to develop a solution located close to the students and which provides direct feedback, making the consequences of their individual actions on the group perceptible to everyone [3]. In order to propose an adequate solution according to the needs identified in class, we have investigated the potential of Tangible User Interfaces (TUI). These interfaces embody interaction through task affordance, allows direct manipulation and physical representation of feedback and cues through metaphors and the embodiment of real objects and spaces [9, 13, 14]. Alrashed [2] showed that the use of tangible interfaces forces the user to take into account the impact of his actions on those of others. We then use the term "referential anchoring" [23], which mediates communication. It is a "point" of support for mutual understanding. Tangible interfaces also support communication by making important information about the group's activity accessible to all (in our case, group decisions, the passing of time, noise, and the need for help that are made tangible). If these shared objects of negotiation [27] are changed by an individual, he must announce, discuss or negotiate this change to the rest of the group. Tangible interactions will thus generate a common representation of work situations [3]. TUI also help limit individualistic behavior by promoting user engagement through manual activities [17]. TUI thus has the potential to support collaborative learning [16]. All those elements advocate for the use of tangible user interfaces. Many previous works evidenced the potential of TUI to support learning or collaboration (e.g., [16, 24]). A recent study using eye tracker devices showed that participants working collaboratively on problem-solving showed more visual attention when working with tangible objects than with a more conventional mouse-screen-keyboard system [25]. Kim and Maher [15] showed that the collaboration fostered by TUI could improve creative results compared to a Graphical User Interface (GUIs). In comparison to PrisME, a software such as classroomscreen.com, is designed to support student self- regulation while facilitating pedagogical orchestration [1]. It allows the remaining activity time or the class’s sound level to be projected on the blackboard. This type of display is only effective if the pupils think about looking at the board regularly and if it is a whole-class work. In this case, we can even imagine that some pupils turn their backs on the blackboard. Even if some of these technologies seem to be able to help pupils' self-regulation, to our knowledge there are no tangible tools that respond specifically to the needs we have identified. 3. PrisMe PrisMe is a tangible environment that might support self-regulation during the group work at school and thus facilitate the classroom management. 3.1. Gathering Needs Our design approach relies heavily on the expertise of the teachers we work with. One of the first steps in our work has been to organize focus groups to gather students' group work experiences. We were able to identify four main difficulties of regulation among the students. These difficulties have an impact on classroom management. The first is that the pupils have difficulty to have a dialogue that allows them to make decisions collectively. There is no real group dynamic and individualistic behaviors are observed. This leads to the second difficulty, which is the over-solicitation of teachers. When a student has a question, he or she prefers to ask it directly to the teacher while the answers are often within the groups themselves. The third problem is that the pupils often find themselves rushing to get to the end in order to be on time. Teachers must constantly remind students to keep moving forward. The last challenge is that pupils are not aware of the noise they make. As time passes, the noise level increases. The teachers have to stop the activity until the noise level is low in order to resume under bearable conditions. 3.2. Design Recommendations Figure 2. Design Recommendations The first recommendation we proposed is that the system should help pupils to become aware of the noise they make so that they can regulate themselves. If a tolerance level is reached, the system must require them to make less noise. Then, the tool must help students make decisions collectively by listening and respecting everyone's opinion. They must be able to vote and agree before calling the teacher or returning their work. To encourage them to ask fewer but more relevant questions, the system should limit the number of questions they can ask. Finally, our system must make them aware of the time allocated to an activity so that they can organize their work accordingly. 3.3. Early Design This section presents all the devices’ early design we have proposed. These artefacts should allow us to validate the interactions we had imagined before going through all the development phases. Based on the teachers’ feedback, we imagined a set of artifacts that could support group work called PrisMe. It is composed of six elements.